Liam Hammett (check many of his other excellent posts) has a nice explanation of the bitmask constant arguments in PHP. These are fairly common and most PHP developers have seen them. However, it’s been a few occasions where I discovered that especially newer developers don’t understand how this works.
Bitmask arguments and operations were used extensively in programming by the older generations, especially where CPU and memory were critical. But with hardware getting so much cheaper over the last few decades, nobody really cares about an extra few memory bytes and CPU cycles.
Regardless of the memory and CPU though, bitmask arguments are still quite handy and using them can significantly simplify the code.